Next week, U.S. President George Bush will visit his country's most important oil and gas city asking Republicans to renominate him, Americans to reelect him. It's a fitting occasion for an assessment of energy leadership by the environmental President.
The record reeks. To judge by events since 1989, the U.S. would rather fight for foreign oil than find and produce its own. A hostile Congress must share the blame. Too many lawmakers think resource management means leaving resources in the ground. Too many of them believe environmentalists' exaggerations about consequences of drilling and production. Bush has responded with persistent compromise.
A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
The environmental President could have built upon a reasonable assessment of U.S. energy challenges conducted near the end of the Reagan administration. Instead, his Department of Energy conducted a 19 month quest for energy policy consensus. During the interim, Bush in June 1990 deferred eight Outer Continental Shelf lease sales that Congress would have opposed.
The process reached climax in February 1991. International forces led by the U.S. completed their defense of Persian Gulf oil by routing Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Then the Department of Interior published its overdue OCS lease sale schedule for 1992-97 the same week DOE released its National Energy Strategy (NES). The OCS schedule offered little outside producing areas of the Gulf of Mexico and parts of Offshore Alaska. And the NES hinged on leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain. The environmental President offered the OCS in exchange for ANWR.
The compromise might have worked. But the product of Bush's pragmatism, energy legislation now in a House-Senate conference committee, excludes ANWR leasing.
Except for partial relief from drilling investment tax penalties for independent producers, the legislation will do nothing for oil and gas exploration and production. The environmental President offered Congress a compromise and lost nearly everything crucial to his country's most important fuel. What's more, Bush won only scorn from environmentalists because he wouldn't sacrifice the rest of the economy to their agenda.
These failed compromises have darkened a grim U.S. energy future. Oil production is plummeting. Dependence on imports is rising. Major producers and much of the service industry are fleeing the country. Independent producers are suffering. The U.S. is abdicating its leadership in upstream petroleum technology. Voters in Houston know what this means to U.S. security and the ability of people to work.
THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE
For all that, Bush is clearly the better presidential alternative for the oil industry. He means well on energy; he just won't push. The challenger, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, exhibits protectionist inclinations that should worry anyone concerned about U.S. standing in a competitive world. And his running mate, Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee, sits on the far edge of environmentalism's overpopulated lunatic fringe.
The U.S. needs vital economic leadership, not recessionary environmental appeasement. People need work. Work means energy. Next week, Bush should show voters that he understands the connection, that he is willing to change, that he would get serious about energy in a second term. He should promise to veto energy legislation that doesn't provide for ANWR leasing and to reverse the OCS capitulations of his first term. And when someone wonders what the environmental lobby might think, the President should ask, "Who cares?"
Copyright 1992 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
